Despite the sharp rise in our standard of living in recent decades, Americans today are little or no happier than earlier generations. Why not?

A new study suggests one possibility: Maybe we need to be smarter about how we spend our time. And, no, that doesn’t mean watching more TV.”

The article continues by outlining three components of happiness:
1. Your nature or personality, that is, whether or not you’re a happy person by nature – and you have no control over this.
2. Your life’s circumstances, such as your age, health, marital status and income. The study continues by saying that these are nowhere near as important as people usually imagine them to be, giving the example that even if our income doubled, we would get used to it very quickly.
3. Your use of your time.

The study showed that people were generally happy in activities that the authors described as “’engaging leisure and spiritual activities’ – things like visiting friends, exercising, attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting in a cafe or going to a party” – and that people choose to undertake such activities, instead of doing them out of necessity.

Moreover, the study mentioned watching TV as taking a lot more of people’s time than the above-mentioned activities did in the past, and that if we spent more time on the “engaging leisure and spiritual activities,” we would then have a more satisfying life.

My Response: Soon we will start finding out that even these activities will leave us empty and unfulfilled. We will search for fulfillment in all kinds of places, until we arrive at our last desire: the desire to discover the meaning of life, through the attainment of the Creator.

One Comment

césar valério machado ~ Apr 18, 2008 at 11:28 pm

It’s not just the american’s is not happing – the entire world now can get by satelite right on their’s tv set’s everthing what is made on “hollywood” and god’s help’s us – how much fake it can get? – superficial, racist, violent – Their imagination’s has no limit’s, especial wen the subjet is the dow falls of humanity.
Mega producions on the line – and in the end we can not sing out one good thing coming out of that.
Mega stars makeing in one move 20 to 30 millions of dolares.
money enougtf to feed thouzand’s of starvish families all over the planet.
Than you have all the midia press and jornal’s, and all type of magazines, tabloid’s wich belong the elite, and they are there just to desinform and nothing else, and they do a very good job on that too.
So if we consider all that, how happy can people be? I think the only happy ones are those that go by all those that can take those “distractions” and become numb and each time more alienated. But on the other side, those who don’t share the same perspective, don’t have the chance to stay away from that kind of life, And that is the mirror’s image, showing us exactly what we should not be involved i